FY’19 CPB Annual Survey – Telling Public Radio’s Story; Local Content and Services Report Describe your overall goals and approach to address identified community issues, needs and interests through your station’s vital local services, such as multiplatform long and short-form content, digital and in-person engagement, education services, community information, partnership support, and other activities, and audiences you reach or new audiences you engaged. At NEPR, our mission is to provide our community with diverse, high-quality programming that informs, educates, and entertains. We accomplish this with a passionate staff in our newsroom, and with extensive national and international coverage from a wide range of programming provided by NPR, American Public Media (APM), Public Radio International (PRI), and other public media sources. It is also vital to our mission to connect our audience to the wealth of art and culture in western New England. We do this by providing locally produced classical, jazz, and world music programs, and in-depth coverage of local cultural resources by our news department. In addition to the on-air content we provide, NEPR offers a variety of non-broadcast resources, from an impressive line-up of podcasts produced in house and community outreach initiatives, to our Media Lab program for underserved high school students and a robust college internship program. We strive to meet the needs of our community, reflecting its diverse interests in our programming, creating connections and exploring the world – across continents with NPR reporters stationed in far flung corners, and right here in western New England where our reporters cover state and local politics, our eclectic arts and culture scene, exciting academic pursuits at our many local universities and colleges, and so much more. New England Public Radio is located on street level in downtown Springfield Massachusetts, which brings us closer to the communities we serve and links our space with local businesses and non-profits who can use our meeting rooms, and the local cultural district for programs like Art Stop(s) where downtown businesses become pop up art galleries featuring local artists. We also offer monthly tours of our headquarters to interested listeners and community members. In addition to our headquarters in Springfield, NEPR’s Five Colleges Studio at UMass Amherst connects the station to the five college community and a news bureau in Pittsfield means a beat dedicated to Berkshire County, the western-most county in Massachusetts and one of the most rural. The NEPR news department focuses on stories relevant to the station’s diverse listening area, a region that includes major urban centers, struggling post-industrial towns, a large rural area and a vibrant academic community. The local news service produces newscasts, long-form features, interviews, commentaries and three news-focused podcasts. In FY ‘19, commentators included Bhuwan Gautam, a Bhutanese community leader in Springfield, Mass.; Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books and professor at Amherst College; Andrew Lam, an author and retinal surgeon who practices in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Pam Larkin, a government major at Smith College, and president of the Smith College Republican Club. The station regularly broadcasts stories about state government including a weekly segment with a reporter from the State House News Service, called Beacon Hill in 5. The Short List features a roundtable discussion with reporters and editors from the region’s publications examining the top regional stories of the past week. NEPR recently added a digital editor to its newsroom, and expanded its podcast offerings, making a wide variety of content available to new audiences, including a podcast based on our Valley Voices Story Slam Series. NEPR has long been a champion of classical, jazz, and world music. The station features a wide range of music throughout the week, including opera, classical, jazz, world, and Latin music. At a time when many public radio stations across the country are switching to an all- news format, NEPR remains committed to being western New England's source for high quality music programming. In addition to producing over 3,000 hours of local music programming each year, the station is actively engaged in promoting the region’s vibrant music scene including broadcasting material by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and from both the Marlboro and Yellow Barn Music Festivals. And for decades we have broadcast live concerts from Tanglewood, the summer home of the BSO. Our music hosts are out in the community throughout the year, hosting events like the Springfield Jazz and Roots Festival, pre-concert talks with the Hartford and Springfield Symphony Orchestras, at the UMass Fine Arts Center, and various venues throughout our listening area. NEPR also manages the NEPR News Network, a seven-station network heard throughout western New England and in portions of New York State which offers 27/4 news and talk content to complement NEPR’s mix of music and news. In response to its growing streaming and smart speaker audiences, NEPR expanded its on-demand offerings on NEPR.net, on the station’s app and through the NPR One app. Listeners can now hear past episodes of our classical music programming, Tertulia, Jazz Safari and Jazz a la Mode for a week following their original broadcast, and access our locally-produced podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play and many other platforms. Our podcast, JazzBeat, and our jazz blog have received praise from many in the jazz world. Our Spanish language program Tertulia features interviews with local artists, musicians, politicians and others and those interviews are archived at nepr.net as well. In 2019, we added new episodes to our classical music podcast Presto! and featured dozens of new stories from local storytellers on the Valley Voices podcast, which has grown out of our original storytelling event, Valley Voices Story Slam. In FY’17 NEPR completely revamped its online presence, moving its website to NPR’s Core Publisher platform and in doing so dramatically increased our online traffic. We’re gearing up to move to NPR Digital’s new Grove CMS in 2020 which will enable us to expand our digital offerings substantially once again, adding video capability and other features that will increase our ability to engage with our audience, and will apply to the Knight Foundation for additional funding for expanding our digital footprint. NEPR hosts an annual celebration of our cultural community with its Arts & Humanities Awards. The community is invited to nominate their choice for the awards each year, and recipients are chosen by the New England Public Radio Foundation, Inc. Board and celebrated by the community at a special gala event in May. In 2019, we celebrated the avant-garde Double Edge Theatre based in rural Ashfield, Mass., Happier Valley Comedy, Inc., a nonprofit organization offering improvisation training center, shows, and professional/personal development programs; Olivia Ilano Davis, the founder and artistic director of Spectrum in Motion Dance Theater of Hartford, Conn., and Alice Parker, an internationally renowned composer, conductor, and teacher who just happens to live in our corner of the world. NEPR’s Media Lab is an after school program for young people, ages 14 to 18. Through basic journalism and audio production, participants learn to tell stories with sound. The curriculum includes learning how to interview, write and produce commentaries and features for radio and podcast. Fundamentally, it’s about providing opportunities to young people and encouraging their expression and exploration of issues that are important to them. Media Lab has established several partnerships in the community including The Care Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which works with teen mothers and their families as they continue their education; the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Springfield High School of Commerce’s Community Journalism Project, Gardening the Community, WGBY-Public Television, Baystate Health and UMass Amherst’s Upward Bound Summer Institute. Describe key initiatives and the variety of partners with whom you collaborated, including other public media outlets, community nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions, the business community, teachers and parents, etc. This will illustrate the many ways you’re connected across the community and engaged with other important organizations in the area. The NEPR news department is a member of the New England News Network Exchange, where material from public radio stations in the six New England states is shared through Public Radio Exchange (PRX). This partnership allows NEPR to broadcast more news relevant to our audience, and to share our content with other stations in the region. NEPR also shares stories with WBUR in Boston, WNPR in Hartford, and WSHU in Fairfield, Connecticut. Partnerships with local newspapers, The Springfield Republican and The Daily Hampshire Gazette, have allowed NEPR access to the papers' photo archives and encouraged their reporters to talk about their stories on the air. These partnerships allow the papers to share NEPR’s audio content on their websites, connecting our reporting to a new audience. NEPR is also a founding member of the CPB-funded New England News Collaborative that shares multimedia coverage focusing on the region’s energy usage, climate, transportation infrastructure, and its people and immigration issues among its nice member stations. This robust partnership produces dynamic reporting projects for on-air broadcast, digital and web presentations, and a series of public Town Hall-style meetings centered on issues facing New England and its residents. We also air Next, the program which features work from the collaborative on the NEPR News Network; and host the podcast on our website. NEPR continued its partnerships with Amherst College and American International College which have had a major impact on the station’s ability to serve our region with news and talk programming.